If people haven’t noticed a tendency to shut down voices that challenge the official narrative whether it be on the situation in Gaza or Ukraine they must be hiding under the sheets. Whether you agree with these voices or not it’s surely a condition of a healthy public discourse that such voices are allowed to be heard.
The EU has imposed sanctions on Colonel (ret.) Jacques Baud from Swiss intelligence for spreading “Russian propaganda” and the EU justifies this with the claim by Baud of Ukraine “orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO”. In reality, Baud’s crime was to quote Zelensky’s former top advisor Oleksi Arestovych, who in this 2019 interview argued that the threat of NATO expansion would provoke a Russian invasion: “With a probability of 99.9%, our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia”. NATO would help Ukraine defeat Russia, and in victory, Ukraine could join NATO. The EU does not have counter-arguments to Colonel Baud, only sanctions. Welcome to the EU—where free speech comes to die.
This is the EU official site Sanction Trackers:
the entry for Jacques Baud says:
Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.
The actual Act signed by Kaja Kallas runs as follows:
“Therefore, Jacques Baud is responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.
The instrument allowing this is:
COUNCIL IMPLEMENTING REGULATION (EU) 2025/2568
of 15 December 2025 implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2642 concerning restrictive measures in view of Russia’s destabilising activities
the full text is at :
This is the legal document which sets out the sanctions regime against Baud and others.
With its latest package of sanctions, the EU has imposed sanctions on military historian and former colonel of the Swiss Army and the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service as well as member of the Swiss General Staff Jacques Baud. Jacques Baud is a Swiss citizen living in Brussels. He is no longer allowed to leave Belgium, his assets have been confiscated, his accounts are frozen, his books can no longer be sold.
Jacques Baud has worked for NATO and the United Nations, among others. He is an irreproachable scientist and a man of honour. His books meet the highest standards of professional historical analysis. He works strictly neutrally according to the principle: both sides must be heard.
It is not a crime to name the real reasons for the Ukraine war. It is not a crime to draw readers’ attention to untruths and the EU’s and NATO’s own propaganda. It is not a crime to point out the thoughtless cooperation of the West with Ukrainian forces, which are dangerously close to fascists.
The Council of Ministers of the EU is destroying the foundations of freedom of expression with arbitrary punitive measures against Jacques Baud and a total of 59 journalists and academics.
Comment by Brave New Europe:
Jacques Baud Sanctioned without due process
In late 2025, the European Union imposed sanctions on Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss colonel and former senior strategic analyst for NATO. The justification was openly ideological. Baud was accused of acting as a “mouthpiece” for pro-Russian propaganda and of disseminating “conspiracy theories” about the war in Ukraine. No criminal offence was alleged, and no judicial process was initiated. An individual was punished by executive designation alone.
The sanctions are not symbolic. They impose an asset freeze across the European Union, and a travel ban throughout the Schengen area. Because Baud lives in Brussels and publishes mainly through a French house, the measures immediately cut off access to bank accounts, interrupt income, and criminalise routine economic relations with EU residents. Although the regulation allows minimal subsistence payments, the effect is to paralyse a person economically and professionally. This is punishment in all but name and a severe restriction of Baud’s freedom.
None of this followed indictment, trial, or adjudication. There was no evidence tested before an independent court and nor was some standard of proof publicly applied. Put plainly, the EU has dispensed with the idea that coercive power requires judicial mediation and operates based on administrative designation alone.
This is not the familiar “democratic deficit” of a distant transnational order that lacks the legitimacy of a genuine demos. It is something more basic and more serious: the exercise of executive coercion without law. Administration has displaced adjudication, and naked authority has displaced justification.
That the Baud case represents a break can be seen by recalling another that once defined the EU’s legal self-understanding. In the early 2000s, Yassin Kadi, a Saudi businessman, was placed on a UN terrorism sanctions list. His assets were frozen, his economic life extinguished, and no evidence was shown to him. When the case reached the EU courts, they ruled that this was unacceptable. Even sanctions adopted by the UN Security Council could not be enforced in Europe unless the targeted individual had access to the evidence and a real opportunity to defend himself before an independent court. Measures amounting to civil death could not rest on assertion alone. That was the EU’s standard, but it has been quietly discarded.
The legal basis for the measures against Baud is Council Implementing Regulation 2025/2568, adopted under the broader framework of Regulation 2024/2643. Since 2022, EU courts have accepted that restrictive measures may be imposed without prior due process on the grounds that advance notice would reduce their effectiveness. While some sanctions have been annulled for lack of a personal link, courts have shown extreme deference on the central issue of evidence.
It is probable that Baud’s designation rests on some confidential file put together by European intelligence services. But that does not affect the substance of the case in the slightest. The real point is that coercive measures of this gravity are now imposed in the EU on the basis of material that is undisclosed, insulated from adversarial testing, and effectively immune from public challenge. EU citizens are asked to accept that the evidence is sound because the executive says so. This is not the rule of law. It is rule by assertion, reinforced by closed procedures and expedited review that shield executive claims from exposure.
[…]
The broader context is the EU’s drift into permanent emergency. Crisis is no longer episodic but structural. Within this configuration, executive authority has concentrated at the European level, operating with increasing autonomy under Ursula von der Leyen, while democratic and judicial checks have withered in practice. The European Parliament has long been marginal. The Council of Ministers acquiesces, allowing national governments to hide behind “European obligations” while avoiding responsibility at home.
The Baud case matters because it exposes the logic in its pure form. An individual analyst is sanctioned for his views, irrespective of their quality or political merit. The EU’s coercive apparatus, developed for macroeconomic discipline and foreign-policy alignment, is also turned inward against dissent. The boundary between administrative power and personal liberty has been breached.
For decades, the European Union has presented itself as a liberal project grounded in the rule of law, human rights, and a “rules-based international order”. The Baud sanctions expose the hollowness of that claim. A political order that retains the institutional forms of democracy, such as parliaments, courts, and treaties, while permitting the executive to punish individuals without law no longer meets even minimal liberal standards.
We are no longer confronted with merely the failure of European integration. What has steadily become apparent is the demise of the EU as a credible legal and political project. When an individual can be deprived of livelihood, mobility, and legal standing by executive designation alone, the law no longer protects the citizen. Indeed, the law is not even used as cover when the executive wants to hunt a citizen. The transition from a rule-governed polity to an arbitrary one is complete. That threshold, once crossed, is not easily uncrossed.
Labour Affairs 